Stylistic Sabotage and Thorstein Veblen’s Scientific Irony

Desperately seeking social approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and the moral limits of capitalist culture

“…The leisure class was thus provided through essentially arbitrary linguistic conventions with ‘a veritable “generalized other” that infects the common pattern of desire’ (Cassano : 384). No such parallel was available for the industrial working class (see Veblen : 177–8; : 115–18; : 218), because the semiotic code of a society organized hierarchically by wealth stripped its objectives of social recognition (Cassano : 750). The industrial working class's aspiration for common ownership and for the exercise of labour in advance of common ends could not be narrated successfully using ‘colloquial discourse distorted by emulation and expressions of exploit, prowess, and status’ (Sebberson and Lewis : 269).…”

“…Smith tended to equivocate on this issue but, on balance, suggested that it probably was (Rasmussen : 145–8). Veblen's position, by contrast, was that this was almost certainly the wrong question to ask in the first place, because individuals do not have transcendent behavioural characteristics but learn to match their representation of the good life to the conditions of their material existence (Cassano : 746–7). From his perspective, society was always an unstable mix of opportunities for the expression of competing instincts (Watkins : 255–6), and whenever status‐regarding consumption emerged as a social norm those opportunities were systematically biased towards self‐regarding predatory behaviour (Tilman : 888–9).…”

Choosing our Ancestors: Thorstein Veblen, Radical Institutionalism and Sociology

“…Accordingly, Worrell reflects on this symposium through a speculative poetry in free verse. Following Lukacs, I have called Veblen's style a kind of scientific 'negative mysticism' (Cassano, 2005a). Like Veblen, who attempts to preserve those aspects of the spirit unprocessed by the logic of mechanized exchange by speaking through the unspoken, Worrell follows Benjamin and Bloch, Lukacs and Adorno, and through style recovers the 'ghost world' buried by the 'fatal embrace of the wage' -that 'repressed dimension', where the 'dimly perceived, twilight existence' of desire resists the 'degradation of the self ' produced by the 'permanent dislocation' of surplus repression.…”

“…As social relations of interpretation and production change, so too does the texture of the object's sense. For a deeper exploration of the question of textuality and the construction of meaning, see Cassano (2005aCassano ( , 2005bCassano ( , 2006. 7 This terminological distinction is a matter of historical context: these 'critical' institutionalists are 'critical' in relation to the 'new institutionalists' that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century.…”

“…Through irony, Veblen displaces habitual commonsense, since the habits of sense represent hidden fields of power. By forcing the reader from semantic pathways paved with convention, Veblen positions himself as a semiotic saboteur (Cassano, 2005a). The dangers of this strategy are at least two-fold: first, it makes for a difficult and demanding discourse; second, out of carelessness, incompetence, or outright malice, readers too easily misconstrue his message.…”